Category Archives: kidney stone

When I got in last night, a tad tipsy as a result of wine involvement at the beeb, Myfwt was already in, on the phone of course to a sister (giggling) but ready to serve me with Rioja and pizza, specifically a meat feast as she’d an inkling ‘I’d be pissed’. Fucking ace. This morning not all was ace, in addition to a hangover, my morning movement wasn’t the usual Trafalgar Square Lapper, oh no, it was more of a case of farting out a Gormley, my delicate freckle subsequently feels as if Janet Street Porter has been eating habanero chillies orf it.

I read something yesterday evening from the revolting tabloid that is the Metro that caused me to say ‘cunt’ on the tube in front of strangers and hurl the fucking rag down the carriage, allow me to hand this one over to you. Some 17-year-old ginger halfwit was given a piano by a relative. So far so good, but it turns out that said piano was rescued from a recording studio previously used by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Queen … Indeed Freddie Mercury himself had paid to have it repaired after he damaged it ‘playing too roughly’. But the recipient of this legendary instrument is far from happy, Emily Davies, 17, from the forest of fucking Dean says the bands ‘hammered it so its not a very good piano’, and it’s covered in fag burns. Her piano, the headline claims, isn’t a ‘Steinway to Heaven’ and she’d like to ‘have a word with Led Zeppelin for wrecking it’. I’m not going to make any more comment on this but if you’re not apoplectic with seething rage after reading that there is something wrong with you. I hope Emily’s fanny eats her alive.

Right, busy day and a busy weekend to boot. Due to all of this I’ve decided to publish an article on Piqued that I wrote about getting a kidney stone, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want Morphine. Following that the usual despicable Friday list, the last one of 2007, and to cap the lot orf, some very early Pink Floyd as promised in yesterdays ramblings. It’s probably my best ever youtube find, it’s astonishing, quite lovely.

Do have nice weekends won’t you.

Renal Chronic

It was about 9 in the pub when I noticed that the stitch-like pain in my side wasn’t pulsing like indigestion or a pulled muscle. It was just there. It didn’t alter no matter how I shifted in my chair or rubbed the area directly below my rib cage on the left hand side of my stomach. When I climbed into bed it was still present but the 4 pints of beer and a large spliff ensured that I got a good nights sleep.

The following morning at work the pain had somewhat increased, still in the same place it had now become a major distraction and I figured that it was time to make an appointment to visit a doctor. By lunchtime whilst walking to the bank I was in a state of denial, now it was starting to really hurt but the knowledge of my decision to have it checked out somehow, remarkably, comforted my usual state of paranoia.

Then it got really bad. My colleague noticed that I had turned a whiter shade of green and it was at this very point that I asked her to drive me to the hospital, as soon as this decision left my lips all hell broke loose and I was in a excruciating agony. In her car I writhed and bit my hand to transfer the awful feeling to another area but it was no use, I was in the grip of a peculiar fever and was dimly aware of a loss of mental faculties, to such an extent that when I went into casualty I had pulled down my trousers and was stood in my pants trying to tell a receptionist what was wrong. I think I was gibbering, I decided to lie down on the hospital floor, and then decided to stand up again.

After what seemed like a day I was put on a trolley a wheeled into a large room with other trolley’s, nurses and curtains. During the wait for assistance my trolley became a sort of climbing frame, I wrapped myself round the steel bars and clearly remember climbing under it. A nurse asked me what I was doing, something in my eyes sparked some attention and I was handed some pills. They came immediately back out of me along with my unspecified lunch. Catherine, who had taken me in her car was holding a cardboard kidney tray full of my stinking vomit, this was beyond the call of her work detail. I think I said thank you.

Mercifully, after losing my lunch I was wheeled off by the most beautiful nurse who took me to a cubicle, muttered something sweet and chucked 10mg of Morphine into my leg. My sticky veins instantly opened wide and within seconds all manner of pain had melted to nothing, ironically replaced by a wonderful delirium. Take the awesome delights of a cold sweat, add half a bottle of claret and the peak of a long bout of laughing, then remove any form of discomfort in any way association with the above. I could feel the hairs on my arms reaching out for pleasure and when they arrived in the form of Myfwt, when her long fingers ran slowly through my hair rippling fizzy bubbles of ecstasy through my feet, up my calves, in my stomach and over the back of my jaw, I was already gravity free and floating gently in space

Its quite comforting to know that in the last stages of life, if the patient is suffering discomfort, they rig them up to a machine known in medical slang as the death-pump. That equates to 40 mgs of morphine an hour. You people won’t fear the reaper, I promise, you’ll be asking him to back to your flat for a nightcap.

I lay on the trolley in a room with just Myfwt and me. I was there for hours and hours, I lay on my stomach the muscles in my body gently creaking as they relaxed from the earlier pain. Presently 2 doctors came into the room. They were both young and seemed to be in good spirits, I seem to remember them both as very handsome and it seemed somehow inappropriate that we were all in this room together, especially as someone had put me in a surgical gown so my arse was pointing at them.

It would seem, however that this was the intention. They introduced themselves, Dr. Crippen and Dr. Kildare (I dunno, I was caned) and suggested to me that what they were about to do may be uncomfortable.
‘Mr. Piqued, I am going to examine you by just putting my finger into your rectum and checking for any abnormalities’.
I think I said bring it on.
Either way following the snap of a latex glove a chubby finger slip into my freckle. I asked the doctor if we had been properly introduced. I think someone laughed, I am sure it was me but either way the feeling was nothing short of magnificent. I had to stifled a gurgle.
‘Mr. Piqued, as I suspected you have a kidney stone, it has now left your blah blah and is travelling, as we speak down your blah blah, blah…blah.. piss it out in 3 days in pieces after we have radiated you (or something like that).

Cool.

Still creamed off my noggin I decided it was time for a cigarette, temporarily forgetting that I was now wired to a drip and had to push a little trolley from which was suspended saline solution. Basically I went and the little trolley followed wherever I went, sort of like Mary and her little lamb but not as comforting.

I approached Myfwt who had cleared a path for my wheels, standing outside and crying softly at the sight of me. I must have looked pathetic, white and boggled eyed in utter confusion from the outside of me but inside, all was well thank you. I tried to explain this but I think it came out as swearing.

When we got back to the ward I was awarded my very own trolley which was eventually discreetly pushed into a corner where curtains were drawn around me and, to my utter delight, a sleeping Myfwt. I woke up thinking I had done something wrong until the creeping ache around my waste signified another attack of pain. Instead of a lesson in visiting hours the first nurse that saw me smiled and injected another 10mgs of Morphine into my leg, once again delighted with my situation we left our temporary dwellings and wondered off toward the canteen to get some coffee where I relieved myself of a good 35 seconds worth of foul smelling gases. They left making the sound of a slow handclap, which I found to be the funniest thing since that elephant shat on the Blue Peter studio floor.

Needless to say the rest of the events in the hospital are a bit of a muddle, I was put on a ward that coincidentally, I had worked on during my time as an auxiliary nurse whilst studying as an art student. I also remember that I was put into Mr. Dougherty’s old bed who had died of pneumonia about an hour before my shift had finished. At some point in the following afternoon since my initial arrival, Myfwt had to go, her sister was about to have her first child and throughout the whole process she was phoning her on the hour to check up on proceedings. In spite of the regular admissions of Morphine her leaving was nonetheless a severe blow and for the first time I began to get frightened of the impersonal aspect of my surroundings.

That first night on the ward was vaguely unpleasant; one of the patients was snoring at sonic boom level, which caused some of the other patients to randomly shout obscenities. My predicament was worsened by the lights being turned off at 10.30 at least 2 hours before my body clock was due to begin shut down and as a result I began to enter the first stages of a panic attack, even when my night-night dose of Morphine was administered the charm-less nurse stuck the needle in my leg with such force I carried a high intensity bruise for a full month.

The following day Myfwt came to see me, she had spent the night in my flat and her sisters baby was now officially overdue, my brother also dropped by but I have no recollection of his visit. I do, however, remember Myfwt rushing up to tell me that her sisters waters had broken and she rushed off to see the arrival of her niece, Isabella who arrived into the world with some temporary complications at 8lbs.

When in the full woolly grip of the Morphine I have smoky memories of reading motorcycle magazines, endlessly going to the toilet and peeing for what seemed like hours on end and being given injections. I remember every one because they were becoming painful albeit very welcome. I have no real recollection of the rest of that day or that night but I do remember that in the morning of day four I was sent down for tests. There was an issue about the amount of time of my arrival to the actual test but someone else championed this on my behalf, though it may well just have easily been me complaining. Who knows?

The intention was to dye my urinary tract and x-ray the area to identify the location of the rock in my system, this would then be zapped by ultra sound but this was not to be. I was informed that, after lying on my back for 2 hours with the taste of rust in my mouth, the stone had reached the end of its journey at it would come out on its own; I was in all intents and purposes free to leave. I was wheeled back to the ward where I was allowed to eat some ‘matter’, I collected my belongings and made for the nurses station. I informed the nurse that I was off and politely requested a final shot of Morphine for my journey. Without any sense of irony she actually told me to fuck off.

I wandered out into the street, abandoned, out of my brains, weak and extraordinarily confused. I needed a cab but didn’t have the cash or the capacity to figure out how to go about getting one so I found my way to the bus stop. It was only sheer luck that I knew where I was and which bus to take home.

When it finally arrived I was feeling, as I would imagine, like an old man. I felt venerable and confused, my bones clattered together with the smallest quark of movement and every time the dumb suspension of the bus failed to soak up a pothole my teeth shook in my skull. I was also aware of the Morphine beginning to leave my system, it made me anxious and paranoid that the pain was going to return, bearing in mind that that I was in the knowledge that an uncut diamond had been slicing its way through hair sized tubes and was now resting, waiting to exit at the bottom of my guts, I had good reason to assume that more may be lurking within.

Two days later it unceremoniously came out. I was taking a pee and my system sort of shuddered and came to a brief halt during mid flow, there was a gorgeous eye-rolling induced feeling throughout the entire length of my manhood and with an audible ‘ping’ a small perfectly white stone shot out of me, hit the porcelain and disappeared forever into the pan.

I felt purged, cured and concerned that I may see more in due course, I have forced myself to drink more water, the basic preventative solution to stones but have fallen down on the instruction to avoid cheeses and wine. Ever time I get a pain in my side I get a little concerned but when all is said and done it’s hardly a life threatening condition.

Lately I met a woman who in addition to having 2 children had also passed a stone. She told me the pain was just as bad as childbirth, well, I said, at least you get something out of childbirth, something to show for your agony, with kidney stone you get, well, a stone from your kidney.

And Morphine, she said. I nodded in agreement. I suppose after all it wasn’t all that bad.